An interesting article in The Guardian Newspaper, titled How to win new business for your company, Richard Butterfield (Relationship Director at Lloyds TSB) says that if entrepreneurs want their companies to have a future, they need to create a strategy for it.

But to build a winning team, it is necessary to keep evaluating the internal capabilities and weaknesses of your company, always in relation to the external environment‟s opportunities, competition and threats. More specifically, he suggests that entrepreneurs that find the time to step back from their daily operations and assess their strategy for gaining new business are often the ones who win the battle. “Business owners need to spend some time out of the business, working on it, carefully considering how well it is doing and where it can improve,” he says “Performing some SWOT analysis (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats) can be highly enlightening and will help you find new ideas and methods that can move your company move forward.” SWOT Analysis, as well as the Value Chain Analysis and the Benchmarking, are the tools we will be discussing in Topic 4